Traffic planners can now request 24/7 traffic data from these apps. Monitor in which areas drivers are forced to go off the routes they're supposed to, and then improve those roads.
I just moved from Dropbox to Syncthing a couple of months ago too, and it's been great so far. In my case, my "server" is a simple Raspberry Pi with a 2TB external harddrive at home, with Alpine Linux, Syncthing for "cloud", and rsnapshot for remote backups.
Good point. According to TFA, they're closely related like a diode and transistor, but not exactly the same device:
The memtransistor is essentially a combination of a memristor and a transistor. Memristors, or memory resistors, remember the voltage that has been applied to them but can only control a single voltage channel. By transforming such a memristor from a two-terminal to a three-terminal device in the memtransistor, the Northwestern team made this tech much more capable for complex circuits and systems.
I recommend checking out e.g. Wikipedia's summary of the theoretical motivation behind them. It's not just about making "computers more like brains", it's rather that memristors are the fourth passive electronic component (the first three being the resistor, capacitor, and inductor). Once we've got a full set of passive electronic components, perhaps a lot of circuits that today have to be built using active components (transistors, op-amps, etc.) could be replaced by smaller and more efficient passive equivalents.
I think it was a reference to the Mayan calendar ending in 2012, when people were freaking out over that it probably marked an apocalypse. Their calendar didn't count down either.
That's why I phrased it as common ancestor: panspermia should also be a testable hypothesis:). If we find lifeforms on Venus or Mars that doesn't seem to be directly related to anything on Earth today (which it would be if the contamination was due to our recent space missions), but still uses the same DNA coding as us, then it's very likely that we share an ancestor sometime in the distant past. One might argue that the way DNA maps to amino acids can mutate over time, but given that basically all life on Earth still uses the same code after billions of years of evolutionary divergence, I think it's likely that at least parts of the code should still be the same.
With that said, I personally think it's more likely that life simply originated on Earth, where you have global oceans as a huge outdoors experiment going on for a hundred million years to forge the first primitive lifeforms, than that by accident a piece of rock found its way between two habitable worlds. I think the timeline of life would probably also be different if panspermia was the case: why would it take a billion years to evolve something as basic as photosynthesis? But if we find an alien lifeform, we should find some more answers:).
Microbes discovered in the Venusian atmosphere? I would be very genuinely concerned about cross-contamination - you know, from those who will argue that it must be brought down to the surface of the earth
Luckily, that's a falsifiable hypothesis. Basically all life on Earth uses the same DNA code, where 64 nitrogen base triplets map to 20 distinct amino acids (plus some controls, like start/stop codons).
Even if alien life evolved in a similar way as us, it's unlikely that they'd use exactly the same amino acids: there are millions of known amino acids, and they form spontaneously without life. Even on Earth, there are a couple of species that use an extra amino acid or two compared to us.
However, even if it turns out that those 20 amino acids are somehow universal, the mapping from DNA codes to amino acids is completely arbitrary. It's the ASCII of Earth biology. So the laws of combinatorics means that at least their DNA code shouldn't match our unless we share a common ancestor.
So if we find DNA we can understand, we share an ancestor.
Personally, I was very happy when I got my first mobile phone back in the day, and could stop wearing an annoying wrist watch. Then they wanted me to go back to not just a small wrist watch, but a big and clunky one? With a limited interface compared to big-screen phones?
No thanks. And I don't think I know anyone who has admitted that they're interested in replacing their phone with a smartwatch. So I dunno, how large was the prospective market in the first place?
I can relate to what he's saying. At work, I spend all day working with text in some form or another: reading and writing scientific papers, simulation code, email correspondence, etc. That's usually 10-12 hours per day working with different kinds of text. When I get home, I'm too exhausted to read anything else for fun, regardless of whether it's prose or just a newspaper. I do however love to sit down and chill with a good sci-fi/fantasy series on the evenings.
It seems like Subgraph OS is on the right track. They're also aiming for a sandboxed Linux setup, but they explicitly name usability as one of their goals, and seem to be integrating their sandbox features with the GUI. It'll be interesting to see how it develops.
Not necessarily. Just use an encrypted file system instead of encrypting each file. Ask the user if they wish to set an encryption password when they format a new SD card, leaving the ability to use legacy non-encrypted vfat if they so wish. Now, every time you turn on your device, it'll ask you for a pass code to decrypt the storage. If you're in trouble, turn off the device, and don't give away the code, assuming you're in a region where they can't just beat the pass code out of you (in which case you'd be screwed regardless of whether they see the contents of your camera or not).
Sure, using that feature might make saving pictures slower, and drain the battery faster. But for many journalists that might be an acceptable tradeoff for their privacy, which is why the best option would be to implement the feature, tell the user about the tradeoffs, and let them decide.
Note that encryption of whole SD cards has been a thing on phones for quite some time, and my encrypted phone still lasts a couple of days per charge, even though it does a lot more than take pictures. There's no reason that can't be ported to "proper" cameras too.
One one hand I agree: it's Linux, but it's definitely not GNU/Linux. And in the cases of Android and ChromeOS, this distinction is quite meaningful.
On the other hand, every time Android or ChromeOS gets official driver support for another mobile or tablet device, that means you've got full support for the Linux kernel, and can in principle run any other Linux-based OS on it as well. In that sense, it is actually relevant.
In the last couple of decades, industrialized countries have gone from roughy zero cellphones/person, to roughly one cellphone/person, which is usually in proximity to that person 24/7. But there has been no corresponding cancer epidemic, where cancer rates in these countries suddenly soared by a factor 10x or whatever. So based on this widespread human study, we can already conclude that if cellphones cause cancer, the effect is completely negligible, and frankly, acceptable. That doesn't change because some scientists made a small-scale rat study. (Also, relevant xkcd.)
Agreed. Let them use their libc, and run their software in a sandbox like Firejail, and hopefully they can't do anything except what you let them do. (Which is to monitor you via webcam and microphone, and upload it to the internet.)
Android gives you the freedom to install what you want, but you're leaking data by default, and the privacy is horrible.
iPhone is a walled garden where you only do what Apple wants you to, but at least you get decent privacy by default.
If you want both, you basically need to sideload a different Android ROM, and most people don't do that.
KolabNow is doing a good job. It's a Switzerland-based email provider that charges about $3/month for basic service, respects my privacy, and contributes to open source software. They've also always been quite transparent, they e.g. immediately notified me when they discovered they were vulnerable to HeartBleed and had patched their system, and the only time I've had trouble accessing them, they sent me an email explaining that they were being DDOS-attacked.
Not sure if it counts as a "tech firm", but I've also always respected the EFF for their tech-related work.
Slashdot Mirror
Traffic planners can now request 24/7 traffic data from these apps. Monitor in which areas drivers are forced to go off the routes they're supposed to, and then improve those roads.
Well, it has been shown that a 5-digit number can be factored using 4 qubits, so 72 qubits should get you somewhere.
I just moved from Dropbox to Syncthing a couple of months ago too, and it's been great so far. In my case, my "server" is a simple Raspberry Pi with a 2TB external harddrive at home, with Alpine Linux, Syncthing for "cloud", and rsnapshot for remote backups.
The memtransistor is essentially a combination of a memristor and a transistor. Memristors, or memory resistors, remember the voltage that has been applied to them but can only control a single voltage channel. By transforming such a memristor from a two-terminal to a three-terminal device in the memtransistor, the Northwestern team made this tech much more capable for complex circuits and systems.
I recommend checking out e.g. Wikipedia's summary of the theoretical motivation behind them. It's not just about making "computers more like brains", it's rather that memristors are the fourth passive electronic component (the first three being the resistor, capacitor, and inductor). Once we've got a full set of passive electronic components, perhaps a lot of circuits that today have to be built using active components (transistors, op-amps, etc.) could be replaced by smaller and more efficient passive equivalents.
I think it was a reference to the Mayan calendar ending in 2012, when people were freaking out over that it probably marked an apocalypse. Their calendar didn't count down either.
I'm pretty sure the market will adapt to whatever Chrome does, ensuring that things don't break.
That's why I phrased it as common ancestor: panspermia should also be a testable hypothesis :). If we find lifeforms on Venus or Mars that doesn't seem to be directly related to anything on Earth today (which it would be if the contamination was due to our recent space missions), but still uses the same DNA coding as us, then it's very likely that we share an ancestor sometime in the distant past. One might argue that the way DNA maps to amino acids can mutate over time, but given that basically all life on Earth still uses the same code after billions of years of evolutionary divergence, I think it's likely that at least parts of the code should still be the same.
:).
With that said, I personally think it's more likely that life simply originated on Earth, where you have global oceans as a huge outdoors experiment going on for a hundred million years to forge the first primitive lifeforms, than that by accident a piece of rock found its way between two habitable worlds. I think the timeline of life would probably also be different if panspermia was the case: why would it take a billion years to evolve something as basic as photosynthesis? But if we find an alien lifeform, we should find some more answers
Microbes discovered in the Venusian atmosphere? I would be very genuinely concerned about cross-contamination - you know, from those who will argue that it must be brought down to the surface of the earth
Luckily, that's a falsifiable hypothesis. Basically all life on Earth uses the same DNA code, where 64 nitrogen base triplets map to 20 distinct amino acids (plus some controls, like start/stop codons).
Even if alien life evolved in a similar way as us, it's unlikely that they'd use exactly the same amino acids: there are millions of known amino acids, and they form spontaneously without life. Even on Earth, there are a couple of species that use an extra amino acid or two compared to us.
However, even if it turns out that those 20 amino acids are somehow universal, the mapping from DNA codes to amino acids is completely arbitrary. It's the ASCII of Earth biology. So the laws of combinatorics means that at least their DNA code shouldn't match our unless we share a common ancestor.
So if we find DNA we can understand, we share an ancestor.
Personally, I was very happy when I got my first mobile phone back in the day, and could stop wearing an annoying wrist watch. Then they wanted me to go back to not just a small wrist watch, but a big and clunky one? With a limited interface compared to big-screen phones?
No thanks. And I don't think I know anyone who has admitted that they're interested in replacing their phone with a smartwatch. So I dunno, how large was the prospective market in the first place?
I can relate to what he's saying. At work, I spend all day working with text in some form or another: reading and writing scientific papers, simulation code, email correspondence, etc. That's usually 10-12 hours per day working with different kinds of text. When I get home, I'm too exhausted to read anything else for fun, regardless of whether it's prose or just a newspaper. I do however love to sit down and chill with a good sci-fi/fantasy series on the evenings.
Everybody can edit Wikipedia, after all.
Can they? I thought they started locking down major articles about a decade ago to prevent the defacing that was going on at the time?
It seems like Subgraph OS is on the right track. They're also aiming for a sandboxed Linux setup, but they explicitly name usability as one of their goals, and seem to be integrating their sandbox features with the GUI. It'll be interesting to see how it develops.
Not necessarily. Just use an encrypted file system instead of encrypting each file. Ask the user if they wish to set an encryption password when they format a new SD card, leaving the ability to use legacy non-encrypted vfat if they so wish. Now, every time you turn on your device, it'll ask you for a pass code to decrypt the storage. If you're in trouble, turn off the device, and don't give away the code, assuming you're in a region where they can't just beat the pass code out of you (in which case you'd be screwed regardless of whether they see the contents of your camera or not). Sure, using that feature might make saving pictures slower, and drain the battery faster. But for many journalists that might be an acceptable tradeoff for their privacy, which is why the best option would be to implement the feature, tell the user about the tradeoffs, and let them decide. Note that encryption of whole SD cards has been a thing on phones for quite some time, and my encrypted phone still lasts a couple of days per charge, even though it does a lot more than take pictures. There's no reason that can't be ported to "proper" cameras too.
One one hand I agree: it's Linux, but it's definitely not GNU/Linux. And in the cases of Android and ChromeOS, this distinction is quite meaningful. On the other hand, every time Android or ChromeOS gets official driver support for another mobile or tablet device, that means you've got full support for the Linux kernel, and can in principle run any other Linux-based OS on it as well. In that sense, it is actually relevant.
Sounds like a variant of radiation hormesis?
In the last couple of decades, industrialized countries have gone from roughy zero cellphones/person, to roughly one cellphone/person, which is usually in proximity to that person 24/7. But there has been no corresponding cancer epidemic, where cancer rates in these countries suddenly soared by a factor 10x or whatever. So based on this widespread human study, we can already conclude that if cellphones cause cancer, the effect is completely negligible, and frankly, acceptable. That doesn't change because some scientists made a small-scale rat study. (Also, relevant xkcd.)
Agreed. Let them use their libc, and run their software in a sandbox like Firejail, and hopefully they can't do anything except what you let them do. (Which is to monitor you via webcam and microphone, and upload it to the internet.)
Android gives you the freedom to install what you want, but you're leaking data by default, and the privacy is horrible. iPhone is a walled garden where you only do what Apple wants you to, but at least you get decent privacy by default. If you want both, you basically need to sideload a different Android ROM, and most people don't do that.
That's a lot of emojis! ;)
KolabNow is doing a good job. It's a Switzerland-based email provider that charges about $3/month for basic service, respects my privacy, and contributes to open source software. They've also always been quite transparent, they e.g. immediately notified me when they discovered they were vulnerable to HeartBleed and had patched their system, and the only time I've had trouble accessing them, they sent me an email explaining that they were being DDOS-attacked.
Not sure if it counts as a "tech firm", but I've also always respected the EFF for their tech-related work.
Short for "application"?
The problem is that they're now trying to force these UI changes on non-gnome software too.
Why the reaction? That sounds like perfectly reasonable explanation.
In other words, you think punishment is more important than rehabilitation?